Michael Chabon's Strange New Sound

His new one has everything you want from the hyperstylist. Maybe too much.

There is a sentence in Michael Chabon's new novel, Telegraph Avenue (Harper, $28), that stretches for 12 pages. It's a dazzling feat of language, a blurred-finger riff that no doubt made his computer smoke like a Gibson guitar fingered too long, too hard. This sweeping passage is a gymnastic example of style replicating content, as we follow a parrot orbiting houses, skittering atop windowsills, visiting all the novel's characters, who — like the NorCal, East Bay avenue where the story is set — find themselves in a state of rough transition. It is a sentence that reveals the novel's strength and weakness: Chabon is a supremely talented show-off.

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Archy and Nat are longtime pals, bandmates, and co-owners of Brokeland Records, a used-vinyl shop in a decaying neighborhood. Their lives are settled into a comfortable groove until Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, decides to construct a Dogpile megastore down the block and effectively sends the needle skipping off the record.

This is the 11th book by Chabon, who won the Pulitzer in 2001 for his epic novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a wonder of escapism that held nothing back. I bought it the day it was released and happily lost a week of my life to it, enchanted by its comic books, Nazis, golems, Antarctic battles. Chabon has become the principal cheerleader for the Avengerization of literature — effectively making genre cool again in literary circles. If you imagine him raising a sunlit saber and leading the charge, his cavalry has grown mighty, among them Justin Cronin (The Passage) and Colson Whitehead (Zone One).

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Chabon writes big. His hulking plots defy summary. When I read one of his novels, I feel a little like I do when I turn a corner in the Met and see the gorgeous sprawl and splatter of Pollock's Autumn Rhythm, when I crank up the volume on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band — awed, hypnotized, overwhelmed. His maximalist style suits his maximalist stories, like the Zap! and Pow! sound effects of a comic-book panel.

But Telegraph Avenue aligns itself more with his earlier pre-Marvel novels — about real people in the real world, such as in the remarkable Wonder Boys — yet he's stuck with his over-the-top hyperactive style of recent years. It's the equivalent of Michael Bay directing a romantic comedy. It may be entertaining, and there may be a great story buried beneath the special effects and explosions, but it doesn't track.

Chabon is inarguably one of the greatest prose stylists of all time, powering out sentences that are the equivalent of executing a triple back flip on a bucking bull while juggling chain saws and making love to three women.

And he has done more to advance the cause of the fantastic in literature than nearly anyone writing today. But he seems to have hit a crossroads where he wants to be able to write the kind of big, sprawling realist tomes that make an American author "major" and "important" while using the atomic-bomb voice that helped him reinvent the genre.

Peter Straub and Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy — and so many others — have been doing this for years, but Kavalier & Clay's Pulitzer win marked a shift in the cultural conversation: Superheroes and detectives and dragons and vampires and robots could have literary cred. In this way, Chabon has proved himself at once a nerd god and a serious American author. His two recent genre mash-up novels — The Final Solution and The Yiddish Policemen's Union — have furthered this status. But now, with Telegraph Avenue, he seems to be writing the kind of realist story he once railed against. I kind of miss the nerd. I kind of wished for a sword fight or time-travel sequence that would have better partnered the hyperstylism.

Underneath the rococo and sirens and gymnastics of Telegraph Avenue, there is a genuinely moving story about race and class, parenting and marriage. I just wish he had turned down the volume, modulated the treble and bass, channeled the subdued lyricism of Wonder Boys. I don't want to watch a Michael Bay version of The Artist. And I'm not sure I want to read, with the special effects upstaging the characters and genuine human drama, a Michael Chabon version of The Corrections.